Best of Pitchfork News 2010

The following is a round-up of our favorite Pitchfork News interviews from the past year. They're broken up into our various departments: Rising, which introduces up-and-coming acts on our radar; 5-10-15-20, which chronicles the most meaningful songs and albums throughout an artist's life; Director's Cut, which highlights the men and women calling the shots on great music videos; and Take Cover, which highlights album artwork by focusing on the people who create it. We've also included a few other P4k News Q&A gems including Bon Iver's Justin Vernon talking about working on Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, "Weird Al" on the Pixies, and Best Coast leader Bethany Cosentino discussing-- what else?-- her cat. Stay tuned for the Year in News later this month.

Interviews

On August 13, we spoke to Bon Iver's Justin Vernon about his work with one of the biggest pop stars on earth.

I was in New York in January and I got a call from my manager and he said Kanye West wanted to maybe use my song "Woods" as a sample." I was like, "Yes." A week later there were more murmurings and eventually I just got on the phone with Kanye. He was like, "I like how you sing so fearlessly. You don't care how your voice sounds. It'd be awesome if you could come out to Hawaii and hear the track, and there's some other shit I think we could throw down on." I was just like, "Yeah, cool man!" I surprised myself by not being nervous or apprehensive. I said, "When should I come out?' And he was like, "How about tomorrow?"

So I head out there and he plays me the track and it sounds exactly like how you want it to sound: forward moving, interesting, light-hearted, heavy-hearted, fucking incredible sounding jam. That whole first week I was there we worked on the "Woods" song, which is called "Lost in the World". We were just eating breakfast and listening to the song on the speakers and he's like, "Fuck, this is going to be the festival closer." I was like, "Yeah, cool." It kind of freaked me out.

I ended up recording in this tiny back room, and then Kanye would come back and listen to what I came up with, and then we'd work on changing the lyrics. It was fucking fun, man. A-Trak was out there, Nicki Minaj. Just a bunch of über talented people and everyone was really nice and chill and just working on Kanye's record. I was literally in the back room rolling a spliff with Rick Ross talking about what to do on the next part of a song. It was astonishing. Kanye came back and was like, "Look at you two guys. This is the craziest studio in the Western world right now!"

On August 2, we talked with Beck about working with people like Stephen Malkmus, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Wilco, his Record Club covers project, and a forthcoming Beck album.

I've known and toured with a lot of bands for years, but there's this almost unspoken law that you're not supposed to interact musically. It's funny. I've even ridden on tour buses with bands and there's no musical interaction. There was a point about eight years ago where I realized, "Why don't we take advantage of this?" Seeing something like Rock and Roll Circus or The Last Waltz or scenes from Motown culture or different golden periods of music, there was always an interaction happening with bands playing together or writing songs for each other. I may be wrong, but I feel like that might have something to do with why music was so good in those periods-- because there was such an intimate interaction.

On June 25, we chatted with "Weird Al" Yankovic about covering Pixies' "I Bleed" live with members of the band and dealing with hecklers who throw things.

Violet, Frank Black's wife, asked if I wanted to be part of his show and if I wanted to do a parody of a Pixies song. And I was like, "Hmm. I think it'd be hipper for me to do just a straight cover of a Pixies song." Then she said, "Well, would you like to sing it with the Pixies?" I'm like, "Yes!" [laughs] That was definitely one of the high points of my life.

I'm always a little leery about doing shows where I'm not the headliner because when I first started playing in 1982 I opened for Missing Persons and got pelted for 45 minutes. After that, I made the decision to headline no matter what, even if I was playing to seven people. I wanted people to be there to see me. A few years later I broke that rule and I went on tour opening for the Monkees. But I figured that's not really a pelting kind of audience.

On May 17, we asked Janelle Monáe about robots and her genre-bursting album, The ArchAndroid.

As a black woman in today's music industry, it's important that people understand we're not all monolithic. It's time that we just break past this notion that if you're an African American female you have to stick to one genre. One boring genre, at that.

One of my goals is to really help open up more doors for young girls who have imaginations. I believe an idea can transform an entire nation; art and music change people's lives whether they know it or not. So if I'm sharing something that compels others to stop being cynical and create music that nobody's really heard before, that's great. If you listen to The ArchAndroid from the beginning to the end I believe it'll help prepare your palate for more diverse music.

When I look out into my audience when I'm performing, there are so many different shades, ethnicities-- I can't wait until androids and cyborgs come to my shows. There'll be a point in time where you won't be able to differentiate a computer from a human. There's going to be a point in time where the android is going to be the other; homosexuals were the other, black people were the other, and the android will be the other. Man has to build these robots because man has to be in control.

When I was 15 years old, someone gave me Brian Eno's Another Green World, and that record became one of my favorites. For this record, I wanted to be able to assert myself and say, "Brian Eno can write simple, beautiful songs that really resonate, and I feel like writing those songs, too." They might all pale in comparison to the simplest soundscape on that record, but I wanted to explore and just take more liberty as an artist.

On February 22, we talked to Bethany Cosentino about her band's debut album, weed, and her cat, Snacks.

I don't think lyrics need to be deep-- just write whatever comes out of you. You don't need to find intense meaning in everything. There are a shitload of songs on my album about being in love with someone who doesn't love you back, and I talk about weed and my cat and being lazy a lot.

I like the 50s, party-movie aesthetic of the beach. I'm not really into modern-day beach. Recently, I was looking at pictures of cats laying out on the beach and I thought, "Cats hate water, so why would they like the beach?" But then I realized that cats like to just lay around and lounge and be lazy, and what better place to do that than on the beach? So I found all these stupid pictures of cats at the beach, and I was like, "They get it, man. They totally get it." [laughs]

On November 18, we spoke with members of punk supergroup OFF! about their new record, First Four EPs.

We weren't trying to create out own Tommy or Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band or S.F. Sorrow. The whole idea was "let's just go in and do it." Not "We've got to push this over in this corner, and we've got to add this to this." What happens with a lot of these bands, even the punk rock bands, is it turns into a two-month-long recording session. Like, "The drums aren't right, so we've got to spend two weeks trying to get a snare sound." Now, we've got all of these people that are doing everything in their bedroom and in their basements, and a lot of that stuff is puffy and soft. Let's just blow up. Let's just fucking go in and wipe things out. Let's just fucking grind this out and not dick around with it.